This is just the beginning of an idea, but as I dig deep into the IndieWeb and think about social media, Silicon Valley’s entry into education, critical technical practice, and other words that I will try to come back and find good links for later, I’m having a little brainstorm.

Information literacy curricula tend to focus, from what I’ve seen, on consuming information and evaluating the information other people produce: is this a reliable source? What’s the purpose and audience of this communication?

But as libraries transition from having consumption as their central purpose to places where creation takes centerstage and consumption primarily serves creation, we need to teach youth to think about other things. Who is going to own the content they create? Who can see it? What rights do they have as creators and artists? What benefits accrue to them from the different possible ways they might share their work? If we’re looking to create a generation that makes stuff, we need to ask them to think about the impact of the stuff they’re making as well as the amount of control they have over that impact.

Again, it’s a little brainstorm that I wanted to just jot down, but I hope to come back with more thoughts on this later.

15 thoughts on “Information literacy needs to include creation and ownership.”

If we’re looking to create a generation that makes stuff, we need to ask them to think about the impact of the stuff they’re making as well as the amount of control they have over that impact.

👍 The generation currently making (software) stuff needs to do that, too—largely very good at figuring out the most effecient way to do/make stuff, but not at all good at figuring out whether said stuff should be done/made 😉

@vishae Start a new line with a right angle bracket (&gt;), followed by space, followed by the text you want to quote.

Micro.blog uses an unspecified superset of John Gruber’s original Markdown spec. There’s a quick reference article for basics in Help, and more examples on Daring Fireball. (The superset includes other things, too, like tables, which mainly serve to inadvertently break things any time someone uses a vertical bar!)